We Are the One : Punk Women 1976-86 - Chapter 3

Warrior in Woolworths

“I drove my polypropylene

Car on wheels of sponge

Then pulled into a wimpy bar

To have a rubber bun”

-The Day the World Turned Dayglo, X-Ray Spex

Perhaps the greatest – and most reluctant - female icon of the London punk scene was Poly Styrene of the band X-Ray Spex, who made their debut in January of 1977. Born Marianne Elliott-Said in the summer of 1957, she was the daughter of a legal secretary who had moved to Bromley from the seaside in Hastings, and a displaced Somaliland aristocrat who had arrived in England from Somaliland with little money or English. After Marianne was born, her parents moved to Brixton, which was somewhat bleak tenement housing full of West Indian immigrants, but not quite the infamous ghetto it became famous as in the 1970’s. The move from Bromley was due to the realization by Marianne’s mother that a marriage to a black man would never be accepted in the very white suburb of Bromley and that Marianne would suffer being brought up in such an environment. Elliott-Said had a relatively secure childhood for Brixton due to her mother’s steady employment, but being mixed race resulted in a lot of insults from other kids and fights. One time she got hit over the head with a cricket bat. Black and white were clearly demarcated in Brixton, and it was hard to be in the middle. She had an early love of music, and wrote her first song of rebellion at the age of five.

"I was writing protest songs in the playground," she says. "Our dinner lady used to make me eat meat and I didn't want to so I wrote a song about it."ⁱ

As a young girl, the sounds of Desmond Dekker and other Jamaican artists floated through the neighborhood. While many punks became exposed to reggae through Don Letts DJ-ing at the Roxy and the cross-pollination that began taking place between reggae and punk in 1977, Marianne was one of the few who had grown up with ska and then reggae around her. She ran away from home in when she was fifteen, making her way to her mother’s old haunts of Hastings and along to Bristol and other parts of the seaside, following rock festivals around the country. She’s never talked much about what she got up to that year on the road, except that she arrived in Hastings with three pounds in her pocket, became street-wise and learned how to get by.

“I’ve been around a lot,” she said in a 1978 NME interview. “I left home when I was 15, and I’ve been all over the place, and that’s how I survived. I've done all kinds of silly things, but I always knew when I’d got to the point where it was time to stop. I got into a lot of tight spots, and up to a point I quite enjoyed them, because I’ve always liked playing the victim...up to a point. Beyond that point...ah ha! No wayyyyy!"”ⁱⁱ

In a Sounds interview in the fall of 1977, she recalled:

“I learned confidence. I learned that once you’ve worked up the courage to do something, and it doesn’t actually hurt you when you’ve done it, then it’s easier to do all sorts of strange or frightening things. If you’re in the right frame of mind you can do anything. It makes being on a stage very easy."ⁱⁱⁱ

Marianne made her way home eventually, and enrolled in drama school. She cut an obscure 7” in May of 1976 for GTO Records called Silly Billy with a pop/patois sound to the title track and a calypso sort of tune for the B-side. The latter song was co-written by her boyfriend Falcon Stuart, who would later become X-Ray Spex’s manager.

“I was really into acting,” she recalled in a 2006 interview with Alex Ogg for Big Takeover. “So that’s why I did it, it was kind of like acting for me. I didn’t really intend to do music, I intended to do acting. I sang it one day to Falcon, who was my first boyfriend. We were dating, and I happened to sing him that song. The next thing I was in a recording studio, and then in some office at GTO, and it was released. It was very strange. Falcon was a film student at the London Film School, and I was at the Oval House drama school, where I met him. He came in and I was on the stage in a little fringe production. But then I didn’t get into RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts]. But I ended up making that record. It wasn't particularly where I wanted to go, because I was working with session musicians, and I wanted to do my own kind of music and have a band. Because doing sessions…… it’s something you do one day after work, you just go into the studio and it’s over, you don’t really know the people you’re working with. Although I was backed by G.T. Moore and the Reggae Guitars on that one, one of the first white reggae bands. They were heavily into ska and reggae.”^iv

Two months later she was back out in Hastings again and caught the Sex Pistols opening for Budgie at the Pier Pavilion on July 3. At that moment she decided punk rock was the life for her. The show had the same effect on a 15 year old named Andy Wilson, who two years later would find himself in the crowd photographing her on stage at the massive Rock Against Racism show in London.

“I was a long haired 15 year old attracted by turgid Welsh heavy rock band Budgie,” recalls Wilson, “and some unheard of support act called The Sex Pistols, which to an adolescent in the 70’s meant a possibility of female nudity. Whilst nipples weren't forthcoming I do remember Johnny's “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-Shirt, which resonated with me - my school music teacher thought she was a trendy hippie chick and made us listen to Dark Side Of The Moon every week – and a 200mph cover version of Substitute, one of my favourite songs at the time and possibly better than the original! It took me a while afterwards to work out what this ‘punk’ thing was all about - but when I did it changed my life - or at least my hairstyle.”

Down at Beaufort Market in Chelsea, Marianne opened a small fashion boutique called Poly Styrene and decided to use it as her stage name too.

“Poly Styrene was the name Falcon gave me. He said, ‘I’ve got a good name for you’ one day while I was doing the shop. It wasn’t a name for me personally; it was a name for my fashion label, so it was my designer name. If anyone’s got any original Poly Styrene clothes, they would know I used to have these labels I would hand sign. You know school labels you would sew into clothes? I would sew those in, with that little logo on in indelible ink. I had a big Poly Styrene cut-out, above the store that I had made with a hot wire cutter thing that cuts through polystyrene sheets, so the shop was known as Poly Styrene.

“Dave Vanian’s (Damned vocalist) wife was next door to me. She had a shop. There were a lot of us. And Robot, they were there. They were selling brothel creepers, that whole fifties retro look. Robot went on to Covent Garden, but they started there. So lots of designers were there. It was an upmarket fleamarket, I suppose. It was a good location, just round the corner from Vivienne Westwood’s shop. I had people coming over from New York to check my place out, all the buyers used to come around. It was like a little Mecca for alternative fashion. Joe Strummer, Sebastian Conran…”^v

She placed an ad in NME and Melody Maker looking for a band, and in late 1976 put together a lineup of Jak Airport (Jack Stafford) on guitar, Lora Logic (Susan Whitby) on saxophone, BP Hurding on drums, and Paul Dean on bass. They practiced in the front room of Falcon Stuart’s flat, and after about six rehearsals felt ready to play a show. The name X-Ray Spex came about, Poly explained:

“From a porn book, these little glasses you put on to see nude ladies and things. They don’t really have any… so that’s why I called it X-Ray Spex.”^vi

Though their first two gigs were somewhat forgotten affairs, they got thrown right into the fire the next show by appearing at the Roxy in March of 1977, playing with the Drones and Chelsea.

The new club was the center of the London punk scene in the first half of 1977, one of those beloved clubs most early scenes had before punk got too big. Many people knew each other, but there were enough new faces it wasn’t like the almost too-insular scene of the 100 Club in 1976. Rasta DJ Donovan Letts presided over the sound system at the Roxy, and since there wasn’t enough punk rock to play to keep the music going, he turned to his personal favorite, reggae. To his surprise it was embraced by the white punks, and more surprising he found himself fielding obscure requests and being handed fresh discs from Jamaica. The Roxy became primarily staffed by fellow young dreads as a result of Letts, and soon reggae became a staple feature at other punk clubs around London. He said at the time:

"That's why punk is so interesting – it's the first white movement I can relate to as a black man without feeling like I'm doing some kind of black and white minstrel show.”^vii

While the first few X-Ray Spex performances were a bit sloppy, as anyone would expect, most critics immediately saw the band had promise. Their version of Oh Bondage, Up Yours! from that Roxy show, warts and all, went on to a Live at the Roxy sampler and before they knew it they had a song on vinyl. Even to the ever-jaded NME and Sounds critics, the sax work of the 16 year old Lora Logic was a welcome flair on an otherwise typical hard driving punk sound. Admiration was expressed for the 19 year old Poly’s cheerful stage presence and effortless theatricality – in contrast to the oft-made complaints about the puerile behavior of Ari Up of the Slits. But issue was taken more often than not with lyrical content being utterly lost in Poly’s “monotonic wail”, the reaction by the rock press to a female singer making no attempt to sound pretty. Ari Up was always accused of the same failing, and while it was true that Ari had little more than a uniform howl, Poly Styrene sounded radically different. There was a unique charismatic and tuneful quality to her wailing that had never occurred before and never really would again in punk. At the second show X-Ray Spex played at the Roxy, on April 16, a usually difficult-to-impress Ari Up (who was pulling mike wires at the show) was quite taken with the band. There was a reason for the unique power of Poly’s voice that few people were aware of, with journalists assuming she was just another yowler off the street. She explained:

“I had some vocal training and was kind of experimenting to see how far a female voice could push the boundaries. My mother always said I sounded like a foghorn. I personally wanted my voice to sound as powerful as possible without damaging my vocal chords.”

She elaborated to Alex Ogg in Big Takeover, recalling her pre X-Ray Spex life in 1976:

“During that period I was working and had a day job, I used to go to Wigmore Hall Studios and have singing lessons, operatic singing. I was trained during that period. It was just after my training, when I was practising my technique. Maybe once a week I would go to see this guy called David at Wigmore Hall who played piano. He taught the want-to-be musical stars. He used to work with people like Leonard Whiting (the Romeo & Juliet actor). It was Leonard that gave me the number for his singing teacher. He taught various people just before that style of music and film had completely had its day.

“It was very, very, very trained singing. I didn’t do it in the style I was traditionally trained in. Obviously, [David] would have liked me to go into opera, but I had different ideas. But I still use his techniques. But yes, the idea behind that style of singing is that you can throw your voice to the back of the room without having to strain it.”^viii

There was a difficult relationship between the mainstream music press – NME, Sounds, Melody Maker – and the punk rock scene. While the music press did its best to prove its hipness in adjusting to the times by covering punk rock liberally, they were still judging it by traditional rock and roll standards and trying to absorb it into their overall frame of reference. Most of the critiques the music journalists made were things that punk fans could care less about or even embraced. As a 1978 film that documented many of the bands with females in the scene made clear with its title, it was about Raw Energy. The problem was that no matter how much bands tried to disregard the press, they tended to fall victim to its manipulation in one way or another. Even if what the press said didn’t affect them directly, many of their fans read it and came up with distorted images and ideas about them that back to haunt them. It was humorous to see veteran rock writers – most who had quite large egos – run up against people who truly didn’t care about publicity. That wasn’t how the rock and roll game worked, and as a result the writers often portrayed people wrongly as moody, surly, or disinterested when the person in question simply didn’t care about them and their tiresome rock questions and clichés.

Though Oh Bondage, Up Yours! appeared to be the bluntest of their songs, X-Ray Spex could never survive an interview without being pressed for its meaning. The inspiration had come from a day Poly had been in Vivienne Westwood’s store Sex and seen a pair of bondage trousers, and flippantly the title of the song came to her. Poly explained it a little differently each time, but this is what she said in the film Raw Energy. Her last line was a laughing reference to a studio version being released on Virgin as a single in the fall of ’77, and promptly banned.

“I think a lot of people don’t understand it, and what they don’t understand, they don’t wanna know. Simple as that. I was just talking about all forms of bondage, repression, everything else, and sexual bondage stems from that, so it’s all part of the same thing, really, just depends which way you interpret it. And it’s bondage because it hasn’t been played, that proves it, that’s bondage in itself!”^ix

With female-fronted bands the media invariably took an inordinate amount of interest in appearance and sexual issues. Poly Styrene felt the same as the Slits about this.

“I don’t think of myself as a girl singer in rock and roll,” she said in Raw Energy, “I just think of myself as a person doing something, that’s it. And I suppose other people think of it like that, but I don’t. And I don’t know why they think of it like that. They’ve just got closed minds, that’s all.”^x

Though she had spent some of her teenage years making believe she was a golden era starlet, partly as a way of dealing with a very negative self-image, her asexual stage look was influenced by a show she went to of British female blues singer Dana Gillespie.

“There were these guys shouting, ‘Get them out, get them out’, and she was just dressed in a pair of jeans. Like me, she's just naturally quite busty, and I thought, I don't want any of that; so I covered up. I wanted to compete with men on their level.”^xi

Instead she went in for brightly colored layers, formless plastic dresses, and her own unique kitschy futuristic look more in common with Devo in the United States than any British bands. What baffled the band was the assessment by many that they were “fun”, or “fun and fashion”, with the overtone that it was a negative attribute in the punk world.

“It should be about fun as well as trying to say something,” Poly said in Raw Energy. “It shouldn’t be just about one thing, but lots of things, something for youth, something for now, new generation doing something, as opposed to looking at old people doing things.”^xii

Reflecting in 2006, she told Alex Ogg:

“We came from a middle class background and we really didn’t have anything much to be angry about. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had enough, and we lived with our parents and had enough to eat, and clean clothes. We were always a fun band. To us, it was all about having fun. And meeting people. There was a real community there that we created and it was separate to the other punk scenes. And for a short time we were probably the biggest live band in London, because the Sex Pistols weren’t able to play.”^xiii

A residency at the club Man in the Moon fell into their lap in the summer of 1977, so while the Clash, Slits, and Buzzcocks were off touring the country, and the Sex Pistols were banned from most venues anywhere, X Ray Spex was ruling the roost in London. Poly Styrene was still running her shop at the Beaufort Market, where she sold skinny day-glo ties among other things.

“My friend worked with Zandra Rhodes,” she said to Alex Ogg, “and I used to find fabrics and come up with designs and she’d actually physically hand sew them. I’d put these little Poly Styrene labels in, because that was actually my designer name. There was a guy who used to come in and buy ties from me, who was the manager of the Man in the Moon, or maybe the downstairs bar only, I’m not sure, but the downstairs bar there at the time was very, very quiet, there was nothing happening. I had a whole entourage of people who would come into my shop and hang out. He just asked one day when he found out I also had a band, if I’d like a residency. So we did a residency at the Man in the Moon every Wednesday night. We had Annie Lennox play there, before she was in the Eurythmics, Adam and the Ants, Bruno Wizard from the Rejects, etc. We had a very arty set for an audience, people like Andrew Logan, Zandra Rhodes, all those people who hung out on the King’s Road fashion scene. Although it was a very small scene, it was very happening. We were like art punks. If it hadn’t been for Beaufort Market, and me being there doing all the fashion stuff, I wouldn’t have started playing live half as fast. Although I had a band and I was rehearsing. It was that venue that gave us our identity; and separated us from the other punk bands. We had our own club nights, we ran it, looked after the door, and ran the whole thing ourselves, and let people play there from other parts of the country that we thought would be good.”^xiv

After the Oh Bondage, Up Yours! single was released in the fall, Lora Logic left the band. The band explained that Lora left because she was still in school and they needed a saxophonist that could tour, but gossip quickly spread around the scene that Poly could not deal with Lora stealing attention from her. This has become somewhat of an accepted wisdom in X-Ray Spex history, though a scan of show reviews from 1977 reveals the emphasis was always firmly on Poly. The sax work of Lora was usually admired as giving the band a unique sound, but she seemed in little danger of stealing the show from the visually and vocally startling Poly. Lora did, however, add a visual touch that was definitely missed, with her mackintoshes, trench coats, and air of detachment. At one of the Man in the Moon shows, the NME reviewer wrote:

“Visually Laura provides a good foil for the bustling Poly. She stands transfixed, staring into the middle distance for the whole set while Poly, dressed in what looked like a plastic table-cloth, does a sort of mutated watusi and generally screams her head off — and I thought girls with braces were supposed to be shy.”^xv

Glyn Johns was a brief stand-in on sax for a couple of months in the fall of 1977, until Rudi Thompson took over the duties. In November and December of 1977, X-Ray Spex took part in a three week event called the Front Row Festival at the Hope and Anchor in Islington, which was recorded. A double live album emerged from the festival as a hit record, including acts like Dr. Feelgood, the Saints, 999, the Stranglers, XTC, and The Only Ones. February saw them go into Radio One for a John Peel session. In March 1978, the same month X-Ray Spex’ second single came out, The Day The World Turned Dayglo, CBGB’s owner Hilly Krystal invited them to New York to play a residency for a week. While the themes of plastic and rampant consumerism had been something of a playful joke for Poly, New York and American consumer society shocked and appalled her. She told NME a couple of months later:

“It wasn’t a conscious attempt to be clever: I just thought that I’d write about all these plastic things because they seemed to be creeping in more and more, which is why New York totally blew me apart. I saw everything that I'd been writing about in extreme but for real. For them it wasn’t a joke, it was the way they lived for real. For me it was all a joke: play with it, indulge it, have fun with it because there’s not really that much of it over here. But when you go there it’s so bad that you think, ‘God, if that's what it's going to be like I don't want it’.

“The weird thing about all the plastic is that people don’t actually like it, but in order to cope with it they develop a perverse kind of fondness for it, which is what I did. I said, ‘Oh, aren’t they beautiful because they’re so horrible.’

“It’s very perverse and I realise that, and that was what was so frightening about New York. People had developed a real fondness for all this stuff and when I'd go round to someone’s house they’d give me things and say ‘This is a Polystyrene present’. I just went, ‘Oh no! I don’t like it! I don’t want to develop a perverse liking for it! Take it away! Leave me alone!’”^xvi

Her ever-increasing media profile did not sit well with Poly, who was not a person that dealt well with a flood of people trying to project their interests and plans onto her, or to grab a piece of her. At the flat, fans kept stopping by randomly. She finally couldn’t deal with the constant energy drain anymore, the whole scene in Chelsea, and moved back in with her mother and sister in Brixton.

“When I was living there, it was all these people who kept coming up to me and feeding me up with all these images and ideas which easily got me carried away as to what I was, whereas I’m really not that way at all... I don’t know where they come from, all these kids, but they always seem to find out where you are... it's just a whole little scene, that area, which is why I moved out. They think they’re something special, but they’re not. When it comes to the crunch they’re really not very substantial. They’re posers pretending to be something special and they treat you like you’re something special so that they can know you and become something special themselves.”

The visit to New York, along with terrifying her about the plastic world to come, was even worse to her than London for fan adoration.

“There it's even stranger, because they really idolise people. They scream and things like that. Oh, strange! People had already heard about us and came specially to see the band; kept coming up to me and asking me all these questions about this, that and the other. They try to make you special, because that’s what they want... you wouldn’t be worth anything to them if they thought you was just ordinary.”

“I don't think you have to avoid success; you just have to avoid all the bullshit. If you can evade the bullshit and the hype you'll be okay, but if you start getting involved then it's dangerous. Sometimes I'll go along with it because I think it’s funny and I think it’s a laugh, but I don't believe any of it. When it comes down to the crunch I don't believe nothing! I'll pretend I believe it. I'm a bit wicked that way because I enjoy pretending, I enjoy letting people think that I'm being pulled along in this little game, but always knowing when I'm going to make it stop. That's my saving grace. That's how I've survived all my life.”^xvii

Things were only going to get worse in the punk scene as a flood of less original people gravitated to the music, and the following year Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers wrote an anthemic song out of frustration at the overzealous fan letters he was receiving. The sentiments of the SLF song Nobody’s Hero matched those of Poly Styrene’s at this time.

You think it's time you took me over

To do what you can't do yourself

But don't let heroes get your kicks for you

It's up to you and no-one else (Nobody’s Hero, Burns/Ogilvie, Rigid Digits Music, 1980)

This would prove to be a recurring struggle in punk rock scenes throughout the world for some time to come. The basis of punk rock was a strong expression of creative individualism and a do-it-yourself ethic. Though it was a community that supported each other, everyone was expected to stand on their own as human beings; there was to be no business of leaders and followers, heroes and fans. On an underground level this worked relatively well. But when it became a “movement”, recognized by the mass media and record companies, a whole different dynamic was introduced. Those elements of the mainstream who clued into it of course thought it was charming and rebellious and exciting, but not for the reasons punks were into it – the bottom line was it sold product, lots of it. The mainstream treated it the same way they always handled marketing – build people up into icons and heroes, no matter if they’re counterculture icons and heroes. Get them lots of fans. Leave them to sort out the damage if they can’t handle it.

The fact was, for all their apparent rebellion, there were quite a few of the bands who wanted the stardom. Most of the boys did, possessed by outsize egos and many of them coming from fairly conventional rock and roll backgrounds. Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon was one of the few of the guys who was more complex in his love/hate relationship with stardom. He was filled with scorn for the mainstream, yet he thrived on attention and saw his stardom as a vehicle to manipulate the media and society on a grander scale, rather than letting it manipulate him. How successful he was at this has been a topic of endless debate. Filmmaker and DJ Don Letts, however, paid him a great compliment when talking to writer Kent Zimmerman in Johnny’s autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs:

“John Lydon was a serious dude because there were very few people around during those times who gave off that aura. . . . I started taking him to reggae clubs. We went to a place called The Four Aces in Dalston, which is the heaviest reggae club in London. No white people went in there. The only white person in there was John, because I took him. Everybody left John alone. We black people had a respect for him because he came across as a real dude. He wasn't created by the media. . . . He could walk into places white people could never go with total immunity.”^xviii

The women, on the other hand, generally loathed the excess of attention. Pauline Murray of Penetration hated the music industry. The Slits made no efforts to cooperate with it whatsoever in their first two years. Gaye Advert was turned off by all the focus on her in the Adverts. Faye Fife of the Rezillos took the piss with interviewers all the time. And while Poly was more patient and cheerful than most, she was quickly discovering how much distaste she had for being set apart.

In the upside-down world of punk rock, a strange thing happened as a result of all the media attention to the Slits sexuality and Poly Styrene’s non-sexuality. As the Slits noted, none of their friends tried anything on with them and they seemed to intimidate any strangers from doing so. But for Poly, the attempt to appear non-sexual backfired. The media spent so much time talking about her lack of sex appeal, along with her lack of interest in being a sex object, that in contrarian punk fashion some people viewed her as a challenge. Talking more of the problems she’d been having in Chelsea, she told NME:

“Nothing actually took me over, but I could see that it might and I felt very vulnerable. There’s so many fakes up there... you get boys coming round trying to find out if you're gonna screw ’em because I've got this sort of asexual image…

“You know, I said that I wasn’t a sex symbol and that if anybody tried to make me one I’d shave my head tomorrow. And so they come round and they say Oh, I really fancy you and they want to see how far you go and I say all right you can sleep under the table. A lot of them come round probing me up about sex. That’s quite weird. And of course, if I sense that someone’s trying to probe me about something I just feed ’em up with bullshit. I just give ’em what they want to hear.

"Young kids would come around dressed up from Seditionaries and they’re probing me about all these rumours that they've heard about me. Such sexual questions; they must be perverts, you know what I mean? If you can’t sort sex out for yourself there must be something a bit wrong with you. What sex is… I think a lot of kids are hung up about sex and that’s bad. A lot of kids come up to me and they say, ‘Oh, I’m on the game’, and I just say, ‘Oh yeah?’ or they say they hustle because they think that ‘Oh, maybe she was on the game when she was younger’. Or they say, ‘I don't do nothin’, I just give blowjobs,’ trying to see what makes me blink, trying to suss me out. Or they say, ‘I don't like sex, I'm bored with it’ just to see what you say.

“I'll say, ‘Oh really? I think it's great.’ And then I’ll say that I hate sex... I'll contradict myself all the time because I don’t like being probed about questions like that. If they really want to know, sex to me is like a beautiful thing and it shouldn't be abused, you know what I mean? You shouldn't sleep with just anybody, you shouldn't sleep with anybody for money, you should just sleep with somebody you really like and that's it.

“And it’s not a power or control thing. That’s what I don’t like about sex; that’s why I haven’t slept with anybody for two years... no, about a year and a half. With too many guys, if you sleep with ’em it's like a power/control thing.”^xix

On April 30, 1978, one of the biggest protest concerts in London history took place when the Rock Against Racism show was held at Victoria Park in Hackney. The RAR organization had been created two years before in response to a dramatic rise in racist attacks over the summer of 1976, the alarming rise in strength of the fascist National Front party, and racist comments made by Eric Clapton at a Birmingham Odeon show. In the city where British anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell had made his famed “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 warning of the potential horrors of unchecked immigration, Clapton made drunken comments on stage like “Enoch was right, I think we should send them all back”, Britain was in danger of becoming “a black colony”, and that support for Powell was needed “to keep Britain white”. Some people gave him the benefit of the doubt, but subsequent comments in interviews confirmed his support for Powell’s ideas and his strong stance against immigration. Clapton’s supporters argued that even if anti-immigrant Clapton couldn’t be called a racist (because he liked black music after all), whereas his detractors pointed out it was precisely because he’d made a living playing black music – including a hit cover of I Shot the Sheriff – that it was particularly outrageous for him to make such comments. Clapton’s defense of himself was based on the same reasons that he didn’t believe Powell was a racist, and he did little to help his case. In fact, support for Powell’s ideas has proved to be such enduring political poison in the UK that thirty years after Rock Against Racism was founded, conservative political careers still can be destroyed by utterances of support for Powell’s beliefs. Yet it hasn’t been poison for Clapton, who still praises Powell as having been “outrageously brave”.

Rock Against Racism had sold 30,000 badges across the country in its existence and had hopes that a similar number of people would turn out for the march and Carnival Against the Nazis. The realists thought 20,000 would be more likely given the length of the march. They were astounded to see a crowd estimated at 80-100,000 people come out. As the first marchers were arriving at Victoria Park in the East End, seven miles behind them the tail end of the march was just leaving Trafalgar Square. The acts booked for the show were X-Ray Spex, the Clash, Steel Pulse, and Tom Robinson Band. X-Ray Spex opened the show at 1:30 in the afternoon and delivered an impressive set, playing to the largest audience by far they would ever have. Before the show, Poly shaved her head at Johnny Rotten’s flat, completely unaware she was going to be debut-ing her new look before such a massive audience. She wore a wrap on her head during the show, however, so few were aware of it.

The PA system had been a last minute acquisition and was suitable only for an audience of 20,000, so the sound was terrible - maxed out, distorted and only reaching half the crowd. The Clash’s inclusion in the show was also a last minute thing, because manager Bernie Rhodes had steadfastly refused to commit to it, which is why the Clash didn’t appear on any of the posters. Tom Robinson recalls:

“When it finally became clear this was going to be a major event Bernie did agree, but only on condition that the Clash should go on last. The Rock Against Racism collective insisted that they wanted TRB to close the show because of our long involvement. It was awkward, because we were huge Clash fans and kind of caught in the middle.

“So on the day there was much grumpiness from the Clash camp about going on before TRB. They were, after all, much more famous than us. Each band had 30 or 40 minutes maximum to allow time for everyone to play before the GLC curfew at six. But the Clash played five minutes over, then ten - and showed no sign of stopping - despite desperate signals from the side of the stage that they’d over-run their time.

“But TRB’s manager Tony Howard was an East End boy and every bit as tough minded as Bernie Rhodes. In the end he told our roadies to pull the plugs out, the amps went dead and that was the end of Bernie’s plan for the Clash to hog the whole show.”

The action allowed Steel Pulse to play their allotted time, and the Tom Robinson Band closed the show with a very short set. Robinson said that they became the bad guys for pulling the plug on the Clash, but that the event was no place for anyone to be playing status and ego games.

The ITN television network ran coverage of the event as their lead story that night. Yet not a single one of the popular newspapers deemed the better part of 100,000 anti-racist protesters taking to the streets as newsworthy, perhaps because they didn’t riot. The organization proved remarkably effective, though. Hundreds of RAR concerts were held around Britain by the end of 1978. There was a second even bigger Carnival in Brixton in September with Aswad, Elvis Costello, and Stiff Little Fingers. The National Front made no further inroads politically in 1979 and in fact lost ground. Poly Styrene recalls no incidences of racial violence ever taking place at any of their shows, but that also the audiences had always been primarily white.

“RAR brought black and white artists together on stage,” she said.^xx

The members of the band The Beat met that April Sunday in Victoria Park, and fellow Two Tone group the Specials played the final RAR show in Leeds in July 1981, with band member Neville Staple gazing across the crowd and commenting:

“It’s like a zebra crossing, black and white, black and white as far as you can see.”

By the fall of 1978 X-Ray Spex had finished recording their debut album, Germ Free Adolescents, and it was released in November. There was some grumbling from the public that five of the songs on it had already been released on singles, but it was still exceptionally well received. The Germ Free Adolescents single, released a month before the album, went to #19 on the UK charts and got them an appearance on Top of the Pops. This was followed by an exhausting tour of the UK to support the album, and a pivotal moment for Poly that proved to be the beginning of the end of the band.

In Doncaster, she saw a bright disc of dayglo pink light outside the hotel window at three in the morning, leaving her body alternately hot and cold. She had no explanation for it, and rather than chalk it up to exhaustion, she interpreted it as an omen that she should leave the music business. She continued on with the band, which released the Highly Inflammable/Warrior in Woolworths single as their last recorded effort in March 1979, but her heart was in it less and less. Though Highly Inflammable charted at #45, it was reflective of the light-hearted softer pop direction Poly wanted to go in. The UFO incident did not help her image in the media, who never having known quite what to make of Poly in the first place, increasingly suggested she had lost the plot. It was admittedly a bad stage of her life that she doesn’t care to remember much of, and says that she had a confusing time transitioning from youth to adulthood. A complex and problematic relationship with boyfriend and X-Ray Spex manager Falcon Stuart was at the heart of the matter, with it contributing to her decline in health and poor mental state.

She left the band in the summer of 1979, which tried briefly to find a new singer before Jak Airport and BP Hurding formed the New Romantic band Classix Nouveaux. In 1980 Poly released a solo album of pleasant light nu jazz/pop tunes called Translucence on EMI, which wallowed in obscurity due to EMI having no idea how to promote or handle her, and very few X-Ray Spex fans being willing to follow her down her road away from punk. She then became a Hare Krishna, and spent much of the next decade in the Krishna temples, studying Bhakti yoga. The main reason the album Germ Free Adolescents spent so long out of print was not due to her religion causing her to renounce her past, as was popular rumor, but because she was involved in a long legal battle with Falcon Stuart to reclaim the rights to it.

Looking back at the songs she wrote in 1977, many people are struck by how ahead of her time she was with her commentary on a genetically-altered world, the rise of plastics, and consumerism gone mad.

“I came from the fashion industry so I could see the way things were going,” she explained to Alex Ogg in 2006. “Also as a young post war 1960’s child, I was very aware of changes that were taking place rapidly around me. I remember as a young girl going to an old style grocery store, where the cheese was still on a block and cut by hand with a wire cutter and I would take this home for my mother in a brown paper bag. When I was a little older the supermarket was being introduced on the high streets and slowly things were becoming more packaged and more consumer friendly. Reading Time magazine in my late teens and having attended an Earth fair in North Devon a few years prior to this I was exposed to the re-cycling of organic and non-organic waste, while at this festival. So on the one hand there was this counter culture of environmentalism and on the other there were very futuristic articles crossing the Atlantic about Genetics and Consumerism. I always felt that if you strayed too far away from Mother Nature human beings would screw up! I guess that affected my writing. ‘Synthetic Fibre see-thru leaves fell from the rayon trees’. A nightmare scenario where consumer led passion for everything that is modern destroys the planet.”^xxi